I have this weird problem that I have posted about before in reference to my SIG RIG. From a cold boot when I start playing any graphically demanding game, after a few mins, maybe 10-15 minutes, I start noticing that the sound gets garbled and the game play gets jerky. At this point if I do not reboot, I will BSOD. However, after a the first reboot, the problem doesn't occur again until the next cold boot from being turned off for a while.

A few of you guys have mentioned that my PSU may be fluffing the CAPS because it is underpowered for my rig.

What is most likely happening is that there is a solder point, contact, etc, that is cracked or not making a good connection, probably in your board. This is not uncommon on both ASUS and Gigabyte boards.

When you leave the comp off for a while, it cools down and loses contact.

When you boot it up from a cold state, it fails to make contact, causing the problem and BSOD. But after it's running for a while, the heat expands this contact and it connects, thus upon a reboot the problem is gone.

I had a really old pc that would not give any video output on a cold boot. But if I let it run for a while with no video output and warm up, after resetting it again it would work.

What is most likely happening is that there is a solder point, contact, etc, that is cracked or not making a good connection, probably in your board. This is not uncommon on both ASUS and Gigabyte boards.

When you leave the comp off for a while, it cools down and loses contact.

When you boot it up from a cold state, it fails to make contact, causing the problem and BSOD. But after it's running for a while, the heat expands this contact and it connects, thus upon a reboot the problem is gone.

I had a really old pc that would not give any video output on a cold boot. But if I let it run for a while with no video output and warm up, after resetting it again it would work.

You just might be on to something. Sounds plausible. How do I go about fixing this?

EDIT: Or should I say screw it and let it ride?Edited by Dunkler - 3/28/11 at 9:42am

I would say 250~ at idle, possibly into the 700 range while heavy gaming or benchmarking. Probably a lot less than you're thinking. With my sig rig, I pull 212~ watts at idle, and while benching Prime95 and Furmark fullscreen with crossfire, I'm sitting just over 700~.

I bought a Kill-A-Watt for the exact reason you did - to see if my PSU was strong enough. Something you should note is that just because your PSU is rated for 850, doesn't mean that it will cause your machine to stutter or shutdown once it has reached 850. It's built on the seasonic, and if you check around for reviews, you'll see that a lot of people have pushed that to near/upwards of 1000 without much trouble!

I think you should try and isolate your problem. Kill-A-Watt is a great first step. Let us know what you find..

You just might be on to something. Sounds plausible. How do I go about fixing this?

On my old machine I would leave it running in an S1 state when I didn't need it.

I did do a couple 'experiments' on it (over the heat vent, blowing a hair dryer into it) to see if I could find the offending component. This did not work so I guess it was something at least partially insulated, like the integrated GPU (hence the no-video problem?) that was experiencing this.

What you could try would be to run the pc with just one graphics card, that would give you a good idea as to whether its the PSU or MB. But I don't see why anyone would say your psu isnt big enough for 2 480's when its an 850w corsair.

Mine was definitely the motherboard, as it still did it with a different psu but it could easily happen to a different PCB or chip so its a good idea to try to isolate it. I still don't know exactly what happened on mine.

EDIT: As for fixing it I don't think its possible. What you can do is see how long you need to let it run before you can reboot and go about your business, like rebooting after running for 3 mins, 5 mins, 10 mins, etc from a cooled-off state each time to see which amount of time was enough.Edited by railfan844 - 3/28/11 at 9:51am